Printing help! Specific document will not print

Question

I cannot print a specific Word document.  Other Word documents print just fine, so it's not the computer, the printer, the network, or the program... that leaves only the document.  I have printing this exact document before with no issues.

Here's what happens when I try to print: the document starts to repaginate, stops before getting to the page I'm trying to start printing from, shows the print progress bar at the bottom of the program, which sits at zero briefly then disappears. The printer shows no documents in queue.

Important context: this is a long document (700+ pages), with a huge amount of tracked changes and margin comments. These must also get printed.  It's also a highly defined / controlled custom template; all Styles are set to behave exactly the way they should.  So starting from scratch in a new document (though it may turn out to be necessary) is a last-ditch solution.  Greatly prefer not to have to re-establish every single Style.

Things I have already tried that did not help:

Printing small sections of the document (this is what I'm trying to do in the first place).

Printing with markup turned off (all markup and comments show up in print preview).

Print to PDF.

Read through the Word printing troubleshooting page. Nothing there solves my problem.

Any assistance resolving this is *greatly* appreciated.

Technical details:

Word 2013

Dell desktop running Windows 7 Pro

Answer 1

To get the correct syntax for p#s#, be sure to display the "Section" number and "Formatted page number" on the status bar in Word (right-click the status bar and click these options so that they get selected).

Of course, as Doug has already noted, your syntax may be perfectly all right, but you are dealing with a damaged document.

Answer 2

Thanks for sticking with me, Doug.  The 'save to PDF' method works, so that's great that I can print.  It's a workaround, not a solution, so I'll still need to figure this out. 

I'll try the copy/paste you suggest, though it still means re-establishing all of the custom Styles in a new template... Which I was hoping to avoid. Frustrating. 

Thanks though!  I got a section printed, so that's progress.

Answer 3

As a work-around, can you save the document as a pdf and then print it from Adobe Reader?

If the problem is caused by some form of corruption in the document, you may be able to get rid of that by copying everything EXCEPT for the final paragraph mark (¶) in the document and paste it into a new blank document.

Answer 4

Thanks Doug, appreciate the reply.  Tried this approach and it prints up to the first section break (4 pages) and then stops. So, didn't solve the issue; but did print, which I'm sure illuminates something...  If I was savvy enough to understand what.

Answer 5

In a document with multiple Sections, it may be necessary to specify both the Page numbers and the Section numbers of the page(s) that you want to print.   That is done by using the notation p#s#